Abstract Expressionism on full show at MOMA.

In the late nineteen-fifties, Frank O’Hara collaborated with Larry Rivers on a number of sassy and urbane lithographs. He wrote on one, “They call US / the Farters of our Country /poetry was declining / Painting advancing / we were complaining / it was ’50.” The lines contribute a strikingly rare note of drollery to “Abstract Expressionist New York,” at the Museum of Modern Art, a grand decanting from the museum’s holdings that commands nearly all of the fourth floor as well as the print and drawing galleries on the second and third floors. The post-Second World War, made-in-America artistic revolution was a very, very serious affair. Its name, having been coined in Germany in 1919 to describe works by Wassily Kandinsky, was borrowed and put in play in the United States in 1946, by The New Yorker’s art critic, Robert Coates. The phrase neatly caught the new art’s strange synthesis of formal rigor and idiosyncratic passion: exploding in Jackson Pollock’s drips, clenched in Mark Rothko’s fogs of excruciating color, heraldic in Barnett Newman’s flat fields creased with upright lines or bands. (Willem de Kooning, the all-time best of the American painters, is a case apart, with a scope of mastery—and a humor—that lets him innovate in ways less drastic than those of his go-for-broke peers.) Another oxymoronic term suggests itself: secular religion. With a nudge from the Mexican muralists, and in a mood that was inflated by American military and economic triumphs and laced with dread by the atom bomb, the Abstract Expressionists contested European modernism at its loftiest. They embraced abstraction as the shortest route to universal meaning and significance.

Most were hard-living guys, steeped in bohemian poverty, with attitudes both aggressive and defensive, hostile and yearning, toward a society that they perceived to be provincial and philistine. O’Hara was something new. Educated in music and literature at Harvard on the G.I. Bill, openly gay and soon to be a major poet, he wrote art criticism and became a go-to curator for new art at MOMA, helping to organize breakthrough shows of Abstract Expressionism. (He was preparing a Pollock retrospective when he died, at the age of forty, in 1966.) Rivers, a former jazz musician who was O’Hara’s sometime lover, had been hailed in 1949 as a new Bonnard, only better, by the era’s heavyweight critic, Clement Greenberg. (He soon changed his mind.) I begin with the impudent pair because their sociability provides a footing both inside and at a wry angle to a movement that still defies rational assessment, six decades on.

The MOMA show is terrific; it engulfs. The museum’s fourth-floor galleries, normally a Procrustean brochure of modern-art hits, feel wholly right as never before. Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 redesign of the museum is a mandarin descendent of the International Style in architecture, which shared its moment of apotheosis with that of Abstract Expressionism. The scale and the speedy impact of New York School painting meshed with the size and the severity of white-box interiors. (They also almost coincided with Hollywood’s embrace of wide-screen formats, driven by its fear of competition from television; by going big, the painters stymied a similar threat from technological advances in color reproduction, which looked good on the page but were helpless to convey effects of scale. Newman remarked that the history of modern art is “a struggle against the catalogue.”) The installation, by Ann Temkin, MOMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, sings, notably in a room hung with Rothkos which becomes a cloud chamber for majestic and meditative sensations.

Like a slow-motion animation of the big bang, the show starts with the impacted fury of such late-Surrealist pictures by Pollock as “The She-Wolf” (1943), proceeds through the movement’s burgeoning maturities, then trails off with the lesser but still glowing efforts of second-generation artists. It ends, dramatically, with an untitled black-and-gray icon of isolation, constricted in a white framing mat, from Rothko’s last period, before he committed suicide, in 1970, and with Philip Guston’s “Edge of Town” (1969), whose cartoony Ku Klux Klanners in a car announce the abandonment of abstraction by its most sensitive proponent. Along the way, photographs by Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, and others demonstrate Abstract Expressionism’s influence on the camera arts. In a supplemental room, the curators have slyly hung Pop-art classics by Warhol et al., reconstituting the shock of the plunge from emotional high heat into aesthetic ice water that befell art in New York circa 1962.

How do the artists, fierce competitors all, stack up now? Arshile Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Newman, Guston, and, by a whisker, Clyfford Still are supreme, because the formal and the rhetorical terms of their works define the movement: the style of each conditions our take on those of the others, in a debate as endless as competing legal interpretations of the Constitution. All are indispensable. The same goes for David Smith, the one great sculptor in a movement preoccupied with two-dimensional aesthetics. There’s no comparing the complex and vividly clear, leaping-fish form of his welded-steel “Australia” (1951) with anything by the likes of Seymour Lipton, Ibram Lassaw, or Louise Nevelson. Temkin is candid about how the tastes of her forebears at MOMA account for a paucity of works by de Kooning (only four paintings), the poetic and deft Bradley Walker Tomlin (two), and the most enduring talent of the second generation, Joan Mitchell (just one). There are a few too many by what might be termed major secondary figures—Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann, and Ad Reinhardt—and a lot too many by the long overrated Robert Motherwell and Adolf Gottlieb, both of whose early originalities succumbed to timid formulas. Pleasant surprises abound in seldom seen works by Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Theodoros Stamos, Sam Francis, Grace Hartigan, Norman Lewis, and some others, including Rivers at his insouciant peak: “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1953), the General upright in his boat amid show-offy scraps of line and washes of color. The drawing gallery, overseen by the MOMA curators Jodi Hauptman and Sarah Suzuki, samples related phenomena from other arts, including poetry, architecture, and music (jazz and the endlessly insinuating John Cage). Altogether, the event satisfyingly captures the coherence and the intensity of a scene that was small in size—confined to lofts, apartments, and a bar or two below Fourteenth Street, and a colony in the Hamptons—but monumentally consequential.

I like the idea of O’Hara and Rivers goofing on the art world. It breathes an air of hanging out at the center of a movement with one’s wits intact enough to sift its grandeur from its grandiosity. For a dose of both qualities at full force, confront the big red canvas by Newman titled, if you please, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” (1950-51). A scoff will likely give way to a swoon: the painting is as drenching and as elevating as an organ chord in Bach. Two main stories competed in the fifties to explain the significance of Abstract Expressionism. One was nationalist, asserting native values of freedom and energy, as if America herself made the works. The other, Greenberg’s, posited an inevitability of formal development in painting, through progressive styles that were ever more attuned to the medium’s material givens of flatness and pigmentation and ever more averse to any sort of reference or illusion. Both tales ran aground in the sixties, when the New York School’s big painting became the chassis for Warhol’s Marilyns and Elvises, and its frank uses of paint informed the taciturn object-making of minimalism. Then those movements, too, disintegrated, and it’s been pretty much one damn thing after another ever since. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He is the author of “The Hydrogen Jukebox.”